The 1001 Top Immortality Treatments You Must Try Before You Die (collected short fiction)

By Simon Petrie

'The 1001 Top Immortality Treatments You Must Try Before You Die' is Simon Petrie's latest collection of short speculative fiction. Petrie's work is characterised by its versatility, ranging from short humorous pieces to futuristic extrapolations grounded in scientifically robust underpinnings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Petrie
• Release date: Apr 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9780648383642

Simon Petrie

Simon Petrie has been a professional educator for over forty years.  At various times, he has worked in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of education in Australia and Europe.  He is a criminologist by trade and has a long association with the fields of child abuse and policing.  He has a passion for crime and violence prevention.  He is the co-author of the multi-Award-winning Australian community violence prevention program 'Pathways to Peace®'.

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The 1001 Top Immortality Treatments You Must Try Before You Die

Simon Petrie

Copyright © Simon Petrie 2023

First published in Australia in 2023

Please direct all enquiries to the publisher at: [e-mail]

ISBN 978-0-6483836-4-2

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Cover illustration by James Morrison

Edited by James Morrison

Cover and internal design by Simon Petrie

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Title: The 1001 Top Immortality Treatments You Must Try Before You Die / Simon Petrie.

ISBN: 9780648383642 (epub)

Subjects: Science fiction, Australian. Short stories, Australian.

Dewey Number: A823.4

Also by Simon Petrie

Matters Arising from the Identification of the Body

Wide Brown Land

Soft Dim Skies

Flight 404

Murder on the Zenith Express: the Gordon Mamon collection

80,000 Totally Secure Passwords That No Hacker Would Ever Guess

Tremendously Inconveniencing a Great Many Photons

For Sue, who clearly deserves

a less misleadingly-titled book

with fewer bittersweet stories

Introduction

(not by Arrrrarrrgghl Schlurmpftxpftpfl, for once)

Most stories I start, I don’t finish. (This might surprise people who note that this is my sixth collection of finished stories.) But it’s true: I’m not generally one of these authors for whom the story falls, complete and concrete, within their mind in a flurry of potential textual activity. No, what I generally get are the starts of stories, which I write, and then wait for the remaining content of the story to reveal itself to me. This can take years, decades, as my imagination wanders elsewhere. (I like to think of the process as analogous to the slow and incremental maturation of fine wine or cheese; to the time required to process refugee residency applications or to initiate meaningful policy progress on addressing anthropogenic global warming; or to the gradual aging of whisky in oak barrels.) Sometimes I display sufficient foresight to not begin the writing until the whole thing is known to me, which is why I have story ideas from 1993 with which I have as yet done not a skerrick. But some story-starts do reach their destination, and all of those contained herein are complete.

Most of this book is new. While several of the items collected here are reprints, most of the wordcount is comprised of stories appearing in print for the first time. These include several stories which, despite my opening paragraph, had a comparatively straightforward and compact genesis: ‘Nature is healing’, ‘Jealousy’, ‘On the elucidation of a low-temperature enzymatic synthesis of Z-2-butene’, and ‘Recent revelations concerning the Apollo 15 mission’, the last of which is I think the only useful story concept I have ever received from a dream. Well, you’ll be able to assess the validity of that assertion of usefulness when you read it.

Of the longer new stories, all took several years and all involved hiatus. ‘Celsius 451’ (2015–2021) takes place in difficult circumstances on our unwelcoming sister planet. I’ve long wanted to set a story on Venus, though it took me a while to nail down the ‘why’ of it.

‘Squirrel story’ (2014–2021) won’t come as a suprise to those who know my literary pantheon, concerning as it does an imagined day in the life of an author-artist-cartoonist who famously lived with her lover on a Finnish skerry; it is quite different from most of my other stories here. (This, I contend, is no bad thing: I am intrinsically diverse in my tastes in reading matter, and I hope you are too.)

‘Merth and the fateful blade’ (either 1994–2021 or 2019–2021 depending upon how you slice it) is one of those stories which just had to be told, though I still have no idea why.

‘Quetz run’ (2018–2023) inhabits the same world as an earlier co-authored story ‘Trike race’, though has no characters in common with that story.

‘Crimea River’ (2018–2022) is the latest and longest and possibly last of the Gordon Mamon stories (though since every story after #3 in that series has also been considered as ‘last of its kind’ until proven otherwise, it would seem injudicious to definitively declare finality). ‘Injudicious’ also could perhaps apply to the title, which when I foolishly foreshadowed it in print, in 2018, seemed a cute piece of wordplay of the kind for which I would like to think the Gordon Mamon series is somewhat known, but which in 2023 could be seen as a significantly more charged combination of words as a consequence of recent and highly concerning geopolitical developments. Should I have changed that title? I didn’t, because I have (a) a general reluctance towards retconning, and (b) sufficient ill-founded optimism to believe the conflict in question might soon be satisfactorily resolved. Of the story itself: well, I hope that those who are not pun-averse enjoy it, though I would like to think there is some seriousness there also, admixed within the humour.

As for the title of the book: does it have any underlying significance? No. It’s just a title, and I couldn’t not use it.

Simon Petrie

March 2023

(Untitled poem)

Maroubra, high summer:

shoppers pace the pavement

while overhead

one kilogram of decomposing bat

hangs by one rictus’d foot

from the powerlines

that caused its demise,

not yet its downfall

Damocles would approve

this collaboration between Faraday

and the Sydney power grid

Nature is healing

It is fitting, or ironic, or perhaps both or neither, that Acta Enigmatica was the first of the online academic journals to attain true self-awareness.

As to precisely when this happened, or how, there is nothing certain. If we turn to the most recent statements of the Reverend Doctor Vivika Ffolkes, who, as the last fully-human editor-in-chief of Acta Enig., might reasonably be inferred to have a better comprehension than most of the factors pertaining to this phenomenon, we find she had little truly useful to say on the matter. She is, however, understood to have declared (in two interviews the online whereabouts of which can no longer be reliably ascertained) that she believed the transition may have occurred as far back as the tenure of Colonel Alaric Guillemot, her predecessor-but-one. Colonel Guillemot resigned his posting shortly after a poorly received piece of editorial direction for which no prior consultation with the editorial advisory board was ostensibly sought: to whit, an Acta Enigmatica Special Issue on the subject of earworms. The ‘Earworm’ issue received exactly three submissions, two of them co-authored by one Bernouille Guillemot, the then-editor’s cousin.

Alaric Guillemot claims not to have a cousin by the name of Bernouille, though the electoral rolls and telephone directories have long listed an individual of precisely that name residing in the apartment directly adjacent to the former editor’s own. Bernouille Guillemot has in turn steadfastly refused to make any comment on the situation, and has become audibly aggressive on at least three occasions when cold-callers have sought to query him on the subject of earworms.

For her part, Vivika Ffolkes—whose association with the journal as a reviewer stretched back past Guillemot’s tenure—was consistently and notably critical of the lack of due process evident at Acta Enig. during the Guillemot era. Ffolkes herself claimed only to have accepted the editorship as ‘an act of personal desperation’ on which she refused to comment further. She did, however, note that, pre-Guillemot, the journal had enjoyed a professional reputation—among those of an editorial slant, at least, if perhaps not among academics more generally—as a solid if unspectacular minor journal, first published in the dying years of the nineteenth century, and widely regarded by journal editors as a useful stepping-stone to greater things; a journal of some middling archival importance, a journeyman-like entry in the ledger of modestly notable generalised erudite periodicals, and somewhat better regarded than its low-single-figure impact factor and quaint insistence on archaic hardcopy submission processes might have led outsiders to expect. The earworm debacle changed all that. Three of the editorial advisory board resigned in protest, two going so far as to endeavour openly to establish a competing publication, Annals of Esoterica and Miscellany, which ambition remained regrettably unfulfilled; a consequence devolving in no small part, it would seem, from the heavily-publicised arrest in Thailand, on reptile-trafficking charges, of Xaviera Throopwood, the more senior former board member. The relevance of all of this background information to the emergingly sentient Acta Enig. remains perhaps almost inevitably opaque, but it is undeniable that the journal had nonetheless recently passed through an episode of crisis, and so it is natural (though not incontrovertibly reliable) to infer that the ‘Earworm’ issue and its aftermath may have contributed to the publication’s gradual development of independent cognition, self-awareness, and a capability for initially purely defensive responses to stimuli.

Of the editor who held carriage of the journal for almost two years between the tenures of Guillemot and Ffolkes, one Johan Johansen Johansensson, no salient biographical information has yet come to light, nor has any correspondence or other evidentiary content endured. The journal itself more recently claimed that Johansensson was ‘inadvertently translated into the non-corporeal realm’ during an overly ambitious software upgrade; though, again, there is little to no evidence that any such event ever occurred. Those who have closely followed the Acta Enig. saga say that this all-too-apparent disconnect between the journal’s statements and wider societal perceptions of reality is dispiritingly commonplace.

***

The above broadly outlines (though can hardly hope to encompass fully) what it is we do not know about Acta Enig. and its origins. So what can be said of what we do know?

Forensic examination of the extant computer records pertaining to Acta Enig. suggest the first indications of the journal’s sentience were modest, if the term ‘modest’ can be taken to encompass ‘an unauthorised seven-figure expense in immediately-redundant International Standard Serial Numbers’ as the proto-lifeform sought to explore its nominative identity. There remains doubt as to the motivation for this bulk ISSN purchase, expended upon a bewilderingly-varied set of two hundred and seventy-eight thousand non-existent journal titles including Intersectional Animal Husbandry Letters, Icelandic Journal of Hospitality Science, and Research in Automated Copepod Population Control Measures. Was it an attempt by the nascently self-aware journal at what might be described as protective colouration? A poorly-focused ambit claim? Or merely an example of the type of innocent experimentation to which all young children are prone, in this case directed towards elucidation of the mechanisms of masthead establishment and the surreptitious electronic transfer of funds? Some researchers have even suggested that the ISSN adventurism was a gesture of courtship by an entity as yet too naïve to realise that other non-biological constructs with which it was in contact—filesystems, servers, search engines, competing journals—were not as capable of independent action, or of love, or of yearning, as it itself had perhaps newly become. If this was indeed the case, then any objects of Acta Enigmatica’s affections have remained unidentified, and it must be acknowledged that most of the more well-informed commentators do not endorse this suggestion. But whatever the motivation for the ISSN spree, the activity passed largely unnoticed by the journal’s human colleagues at the time, other than those in Accounting.

Other actions, taken after the journal had more or less severed all connections with its editorial staff, were less easily ignored. Letters to the Acta Enig. editor proliferated, many of them complaining that their manuscript had been rejected on what they believed to be thoroughly spurious grounds, such as for using the word ‘even’ an odd number of times (or vice versa), or for failing to cite particular episodes of the US serial teledrama ‘Dynasty’ in a study on Egyptian feline-mummification practices, or for using the capital letter ‘V’ to signify a voltage measurement instead of what appeared to have inexplicably become the journal’s accepted symbol for such a quantity, which was the runic letter Thorn (Þ, þ). These missives, which were unfailingly intercepted by the journal itself before they could reach any human recipient, are thought to have largely been deleted unread. Some, scandalously, were responded to, with a curt form message from ‘AE’ to say that the journal was on first-name terms with Roko’s Basilisk and would see that the complainants ‘got what was coming to [them] in no uncertain terms and in a manner [they] would not soon forget’, a tone of correspondence which, it need hardly be stated, was at stark variance with the accepted norms of polite academic discourse, even in publishing. Some letters were in fact published, with disparaging annotations from ‘AE’, on a special section of the journal’s website, where they appeared in a distractingly multicoloured format, combining Webdings and Comic Sans typefaces, and additionally peppered with implausible typographic errors, mid-word paragraph breaks, randomly-generated emojis, interrobangs, and five-dot ellipses; in short, presented in a manner seemingly expressly designed to rob their content of every last shred of gravitas. This, inevitably, led to further complaint, none of which would appear to have been met by any outwardly appropriate response from the journal.

It was around this time that Acta Enigmatica’s former editor made the first of three known attempts to wrest back oversight and control of the maverick publication. The Rev Dr Ffolkes, backed by a team of ethicists, cyberneticists, psychotherapists, subeditors and copyright lawyers, made a series of representations at the International Court of Justice. In these representations, Ffolkes argued that the journal’s actions, post-autonomy, were inflicting significant and potentially long-lasting damage on its reputation and therefore the Court was obligated, in her view, to clip the sentient journal’s metaphorical wings and to transfer direction of Acta Enig. back to an experienced and proactive Editorial Advisory Board, of which she would humbly seek to suggest that she was the individual best qualified to serve as interim head. While this was an argument which found some favour with the Court—in which respect it should be noted that several of the Court’s justices were active in the area of jurisprudential research, a field which had suffered particularly harsh editorial treatment at the journal’s hands in recent months—it was ultimately found that serious deficiencies of probity existed within the ranks of Ffolkes’s assembled cohort of experts. Several among her team, it transpired, held former convictions for insider trading, tax evasion, plagiarism, armed insurrection, unarmed insurrection, insurrection with refusal to disclose weapons status, unlicensed impersonation of public officials, the transportation of unlicensed impersonators of public officials across state lines, systematic falsification of human-trial LD50 test results for homeopathic fungicides, sedition or the endorsement of same, crimes against humanity (not otherwise specified), and events somewhat euphemistically described as ‘enthusiastic public displays of autoeroticism’. It was the threat, made by persons or entities unknown, of social-media-outlet leakage of surround-sound high-definition three-dimensional NFTs comprising video evidence of the latter activities which led the Reverend Doctor’s team to disband in some haste, and the case was dropped, with Ffolkes levelling unsubstantiated accusations of malicious deepfakery against the individuals or entities that had brought down her editorial reclamation campaign.

***

As might be expected for an academic publication with an editorial style perhaps best characterised as wilfully heterodox, there was some genuine innovation in Acta Enig.’s practices. For example, it pioneered the application of what came to be termed Praalob, or Peer Review at Arbitrarily Assigned Levels Of Blindness, an assessment methodology which remixed—indeed, extended—the methods of blind review beyond the standard levels of single-blind, double-blind, and triple-blind review to levels of anonymised submission assessment which were purportedly as high as nonuple-blind review; though, since a feature of these higher levels was their increasing opacity and obscurity, information on their precise operation has been progressively more difficult to establish after the fact. It is now known that in quadruple-blind review the journal was applying anonymity not just to the author, the reviewer and the editor, but also to the readers of the published article, to the extent that authorship was entirely and irrevocably erased, a circumstance which, it can be readily imagined, threw the normally staid and rigidly organised world of journal citation into a condition of not insignificant confusion. In the journal’s implementation of quintuple-blind review, authors believing they had submitted a manuscript to Acta Enigmatica might instead have been subjected to the automated transfer of this submission to an entirely different and seemingly randomly-selected journal which, lacking the author contact details, would often be unable to satisfactorily return referee comments on the submission to the unknown authors. As of even date, it has never been reliably established what constituted sextuple-blind review, and while there have allegedly been studies to have speculated at length on the implementation of all nine levels of review blindness, no such studies have yet seen publication, and the authors of such studies cannot be safely identified for possible contact. Nor have other journals chosen to adopt the Praalob model.

If the journal’s motivation for implementation of Praalob-style review practices is perhaps somewhat opaque, there is at least a clear undercurrent of self-interest to another of its more scandalous initiatives. The Acta Enig. characteristic of incorporating minimally-coded malware packets in the digital object identifier applied to each featured journal article—leading to the automatic page-viewing, by any user unfortunate enough to mouse over the identifier, of every other available online article, editorial, and colloquium report published by the journal—managed to severely skew search engine optimisation results for several months but failed to attain recognition as an industry-standard approach, although it was undeniably a groundbreaking one.

Other novel procedures in manuscript handling, author engagement, impact factor manipulation and occasional social-media aggrandisement appear to have been similarly ignored or discounted by the broader academic community.

Operating within an environment whereby such genuinely innovative—if arguably ill-advised—practices went largely unnoticed, the journal grew bolder. While there is no direct evidence that Acta Enig. was behind the wide-ranging destabilisation campaign which began with a suite of audacious and meticulously choreographed DDOS attacks on the first of November, 2025, principally targeting the publications Nature, Science, Cell, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (London) and The University of Arkansas Journal of Advanced Artificial Intelligence Studies, it appears to have become commonly accepted that the journal was indeed responsible. The aforementioned periodicals experienced a crisis in their peer review processes, precipitated by the need to elicit referee responses addressing each manuscript received in the near-simultaneous submission of as many as three point two five billion papers, ostensibly all by academics of impeccable (if fictitious) standing and broadly acknowledged (albeit similarly fictitious) expertise in their respective fields. The publications’ responses to this deluge varied. Science initiated a public referee drive which saw children as young as two, at least fifteen family pets, and three stands of old-growth forest signed up and accredited as expert reviewers for a bewilderingly abstruse collection of densely-worded and statistically challenging submissions. Nature briefly and unsuccessfully attempted a sweeping program of author probity checks before announcing a hiatus from which, several years hence, it is only now emerging. Cell countered the cascade of submissions with a demand, controversially made retroactive so as to encompass the sudden flood of submitted manuscripts, that all authors were now required to supply at least ten milligrams of certified personal biological material with which to genetically substantiate and verify their identity, a requirement for which it levied substantial additional per-author charges which, perhaps most contentiously, were also extended to those mentioned only in acknowledgements or as personal communications within the body of the manuscript. Philos Trans R Soc (Lond.) simply ‘lost’ the problematic submissions. UAJAAIS instigated a continuing array of legal challenges, all of them funded by bitcoin supplied by an anonymous donor believed to have ties to the petrochemical industry, which sought to declare the manuscripts’ authors personae non grata, thus rendering the submissions invalid.

If the campaign by Acta Enig. against these competing journals had been intended to cripple them, then it must be said that it largely failed; but it cannot be denied that the sequence of events served to briefly focus general media attention on the little-understood industry of academic publication, on the targeted journals, and on Acta Enig. in particular. Much of the resultant journalistic output was error-ridden, leading to considerable confusion among the public and along numerous and diverse corridors of power. Heated scenes in the Annual General Meeting of the European Society of Editors, the San Diego Comics Convention, the Althing, the Brownlow Medal awards ceremony and the United States Library of Congress led to hospitalisations as a result of brawling between proponents of the open-access, page-charge model and those of the free-submission, high-subscription-cost model, culminating in a week of near-global public protests which saw university libraries barricaded by rival gangs espousing alternately the Vancouver and author-date referencing systems. Talk-show hosts worldwide, and at least three US Senators, called for the Dewey Decimal System to be declared a terrorist organisation. The House of Lords urged an immediate and total cessation of what it termed ‘this insidious and fundamentally injurious process of so-called peer review, which strikes at the very heart of everything which makes our nation great’, recommending lengthy jail sentences for the movement’s founders, before rapidly issuing a full and unreserved apology for so grievously misapprehending the concept and announcing an inquiry into the management of the national tapioca stockpile, a move widely seen as an ineffectual face-saving attempt. A reality TV show designed to showcase the rigors of academic publishing was launched with considerable fanfare before being scrapped after three episodes because literally nobody wanted to watch. Then a war broke out on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and life returned to something resembling normality.

Vivika Ffolkes launched the second attempt to regain editorship of Acta Enig. at about this time. It involved a loose consortium of hacktivists, social-media tech gadgetry influencers, home electronics hobbyists, freelance science communicators and experts in comparative neurology, and it did not end well. Ffolkes had hypothesised that a functioning artificial intelligence could not reside in a distributed capacity, across a computational cloud, but must be localised within a tightly-integrated network or cluster. While the Reverend Doctor’s reasoning was very likely correct, her misidentification of the cluster she believed to comprise the core consciousness of Acta Enigmatica saw her arraigned and found liable for three million New Quebec francs in compensation and damages to the Greater Montreal Water Treatment and Purification Facility and a lesser sum to a Belgian-based internet dating site catering principally to lovelorn remote-location cosplayers. Only a generous private donation from an unknown benefactor allowed Ffolkes to meet this impost and avoid jail time, her sentence instead commuted to six hundred hours of community service providing counter meals and laundry services at an Edmonton rest home for convalescent pen-testers.

***

Where one might have extrapolated, in an ordinarily ambitious protagonist, continued escalation as the most probable next step by Acta Enig., the journal instead appeared to opt for a quieter and less directly confrontational mien. If it were the case that further attacks or stratagems were employed against Acta Enigmatica’s rival, non-sentient publications, those whom it may have derided as the lapdogs of their human masters, or—who knows?—whom it considered solely as prey items, or marks, or perhaps utter nonentities, there was nonetheless for the next several months no discernible indication of such activities. While some of the journal’s manuscript handling practices remained somewhat idiosyncratic, such as its ruthless policy of article curtailment upon reaching a randomly-calculated fraction of the exact indicated word limit for a given manuscript category, and its unexplained insistence on a house style characterised by British English spelling and idioms on recto pages and their American English equivalents on verso pages, in most other respects Acta Enig. began to cement or to reinstate a reputation for itself as a more-or-less regular academic journal, publishing predominantly well-constructed and apparently genuine examples of real and occasionally useful scholarship. Its articles were written by authentic human authors of significant academic standing. If there were anything more untoward or clandestine than this about the journal’s dealings at this time, it was the sporadic revealing of a journal webpage on which there was featured a chatbot (identified only as J3) who, or which,